When I stopped programming I moved more into technical testing and that morphed into 'project guru' on some quite large projects. I could understand from low level network protocols up to the big fluffy clouds, I could also pick things up very quickly as I understood all the building blocks if not the latest buzz words. From my first exposure to SQL I was optimising databases better than the incumbent dba within a couple of months, and that wasn't even my job.

I loved the work, but the downside was no one ever advertised for that role despite it was very important to the project.